I couldn't. By the second championship, I was hooked on the green-and-gold stuff.

Thanks, Vince.

Brett Favre gets addicted to Vicodin and is out of rehab in 46 days. Poor fools like me have been going through championship withdrawal for 29 years.

That's why all the Packer glory years lore they're dishing up like jambalaya this week is making me gag. My Green Bay Packers aren't Lombardi and Ray Nitschke and Bart Starr any more than they're Mike Holmgren and Reggie White and Favre.

My Packers are Dan Devine, Tony Mandarich and Charles Martin, proof that all the Cheddarheads don't sit in the stands.

Lombardi was simply a lucky break, the Packers' choice only after Iowa coach Forest Evashevski turned them down. In the 11 years before Vince came, the team didn't have a winning season; in the 24 years after he resigned, they had just five.

Losing wasn't everything; it was the only thing.

The reason for the post-Lombardi letdown is no more mysterious than the Bears' offense. The Packers tried to recreate the magic without the magician, continuing to give their coaches control over drafts and trades.

That put rosters totally in the hands of Devine, Starr and Forrest Gregg, who had all the personnel acumen of Chelsea Clinton.

Five games into the 1974 season, Devine masterminded the John Hadl trade, which you could call the Louisiana Purchase of football deals except that even the French weren't that stupid.

France at least got $15 million. All the Packers got was a 34-year-old used-up quarterback who lasted two seasons. In return, they gave up first-, second- and third-round picks in the 1975 draft and first- and second-rounders in 1976.

(In '75, by the way, they also gave up picks for QB immortals Jim Del Gaizo and ex-Bear Jack Concannon. That 29-year dry spell starting to make sense yet?)

Devine got Hadl in a desperate attempt to save his job, but the Pack finished 6-8 anyway and the coach left for Notre Dame ahead of the posse. The Packers replaced him as coach and general manager with Starr, whose only qualification, other than being Lombardi's quarterback, was a year as an assistant coach.

The Hadl deal entered Packer history sardonically dubbed the Lawrence Welk trade ("A one and a two and a three . . ."), but the sad truth is the club would have blown those picks anyway.

In 1972, for instance, the year Americans re-elected Richard Nixon, Devine made a choice almost as bad, squandering a first-round pick on Nebraska quarterback Jerry Tagge, a Green Bay product who couldn't throw. In '73, Devine spent his No. 1 on Florida State wide receiver Barry Smith, who couldn't catch, at least not over the middle.

Starr topped that in 1980 and 1981, when he used No. 1s for Penn State defensive lineman Bruce Clark, who promptly bolted to the Canadian Football League, and California QB Rich Campbell, who had an arm like Rich Little but couldn't impersonate an NFL quarterback. Starr grabbed Campbell after an assistant coach convinced him future All-Pro defensive back Ronnie Lott was just average.

The string of draft ineptitude extended into the '90s, with the Packers spending No. 1 picks in 1991 and 1992 on cornerbacks Vinnie Clark and Terrell Buckley, neither of whom could cover a casserole dish, but compensated by blowing assignments.

Even when the Packers had the right idea, they screwed up. In 1988, Lindy Infante's first year as head coach, they were 2-12 and needed only to keep losing to get the first pick in the draft and select QB Troy Aikman.

The Packers proceeded to win their last two games, thereby ceding Aikman to Dallas. They recovered nicely by passing up superstar running back Barry Sanders for Michigan State offensive tackle Tony Mandarich, the ultimate draft bust.

To lousy trades and lousy drafts, the Packers added lousy luck. Three No. 1s who actually could play, running back Eddie Lee Ivery (1979), defensive back Tim Lewis (1983) and wide receiver Sterling Sharpe (1988), all had their careers shortened by injury.

That was part of a seemingly endless series of career-ending injuries (three starting linebackers fell in the '90s alone) that fans took to calling the Lombardi Curse, as if old Vince had wrung every last drop of luck from the venerable franchise and left a quarter-century dark cloud hovering over the suckers who succeeded him.

For a Packer fan, all this was purgatory. Hell was suffering through it in Chicago when the Bears were good. That, of course, means the 1985 season. Bad enough the Bears won Super Bowl XX, worse that they humiliated Green Bay on the way.

First came the memorable Monday night game when 320-pound Fridge Perry, playing blocking back in Mike Ditka's goal-line offense, blocked 220-pound Packer linebacker George Cumby into Door County on a Walter Payton TD run. Two weeks later in Green Bay, Perry caught a 4-yard scoring pass from current Packer backup QB Jim McMahon in a six-point Bear victory.

The next season, the Packers managed to humiliate themselves. Nose tackle Charles Martin body-slammed McMahon to the ground and was ejected, one of many such acts of thuggery in Gregg's four seasons as coach that made the Packers the NFL's cheap-shot champs.

This was the low point of the sorry years. Not only were the Packers lousy, now they were dirty too.

The sleaze seeped off the field in the '80s as well. Several Packers were involved in sexual misconduct cases, including a player for whom they swapped a first-round draft pick. Another Packer was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.

Infante, who in an organizational change split authority with Vice President of Football Operations Tom Braatz, drained the sewer after Gregg resigned in early 1988, but the team still couldn't win.

That finally changed in 1991 when Packer President Bob Harlan figured out one man should rule the football operation, and that it wouldn't be the coach.

He fired Braatz and hired Ron Wolf as executive vice president and general manager. For the first time since Lombardi, the right man would be doing the right job.

Other than drafting Buckley, Wolf has done almost everything right. That includes hiring Holmgren and trading for Favre, who Sunday will help make the term Titletown more than a self-indulgent parody of bygone days.

And somewhere in Wisconsin, some 10-year-old kid will be watching, falling hard for a team that inevitably will break his heart. He'll think that backing the Pack is all cheese-wedge hats and Lambeau leaps and Brett Favre TD passes.

He'll find out too late it's season after season of Jim Del Gaizo and Rich Campbell.